


mors certissima

by northerntrash



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mythology, Greek Mythology AU, Hades!Aziraphale, Inspired by Hades and Persephone (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), M/M, Mythology - Freeform, Persephone!Crowley
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-09-02 09:00:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 19,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20273344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/northerntrash/pseuds/northerntrash
Summary: And was it really that simple? One piece of forbidden fruit? Crowley was looking at him, his eyes like falling stars.“Could I tempt you?” he asked, and Aziraphale laughed.





	1. Chapter 1

Right, where to begin.

Back in the beginning, before there was anything of note, things were chaotic and… well, just a bit lumpy. Everything was still unformed, and the only thing that was really there in the great and unending void of nothingness was the darkness, which swirled and thought and eventually got a bit bored of there being absolutely nothing else in the vast chasm of existence. So, it started to make things. If it had understood the concept it would have known that it was lonely, just its great unceasing self with nothing to do and no one to have a nice chat with. So, after an indeterminate amount of time that might have been a second and might have been a millennia, it gave up the parts of itself to create… more.

Planets, and burning stars to warm them, then more stars, enough to fill eternity, the great cosmos spinning out around itself. Finally, there was light, and it ate at the darkness but created _more, _so it let it be. It parcelled up everything it was into new forms and breathed life on them.

Thus, the Earth was born.

Thus, everything else was born too.

The Earth came out lumpy and misshapen, and first the darkness wept to see it, filling great ravines with its tears until much of its surface was covered with salt-water. But then it saw the beauty of it, all the grey and blue, and despite its faults there was something singularly magnificent about it, about its very existence.

It was at that moment that the darkness began to think of itself as a mother, or perhaps The Mother, and so she took it upon herself to help this one little planet along a bit.

The All-Mother created guardians for the little-planet-that-could, and left them on the mountain tops, and wandered away to the next world, to see what else could be made.

She left these beings quite alone.

That might have been her biggest mistake.

The Guardians were supposed to have come out all the same, equal of might and temperament, but of course, once you breathe life into something you lose your ability to control them. They soon developed their own personalities, their own feelings, and their own hatreds as well. They called themselves Gods, and at the beginning, they had no qualities, no tasks to guide them.

They entertained themselves as best they could, and unfortunately, that led very quickly to war, because that is exactly the sort of thing that happens when mothers wander off and leave their children to their own devices.

What they argued about is lost to time. Whether it was over space, or power, or simply that they didn’t like each other very much is no longer known by anyone other than the Gods themselves, and they are not talking. What _is _known is that some of the Gods overpowered the others and threw them from the mountaintops to the ground below. It was – and remains – impossible to kill a God, but banishment from their mountain fortresses was certainly a manageable task. It was then that the Gods took upon themselves the tasks that had been waiting for them, bowed their heads to the mantle of their powers. The greatest Gods on the mountains acquired the celestial duties, and the lesser Gods of the mountains found themselves with smaller roles, some of which didn’t seem to make any sense. They simply sat and watched and waited whilst the stronger Gods looked after the air and blew the winds and formed the clouds and moved the sun across the sky and painted new stories into the skies. They formed strict hierarchies and divisions between themselves, based on their duties, and all settled into their appointed roles.

The Gods on the ground took over maintenance of the earth itself. They knew the taste of the sea and the touch of the leaf and the feeling of the earth on their backs from when they had been cast from the mountaintops, so they found themselves caring for the sea and the land and the plants and the animals that soon began to fill the land and water, wished into being by Gods or else simply just appearing, as if they had been waiting for a God to arrive to look after them.

And so, after the Great Divide, there were in fact two kinds of Gods: the Celestial, and the Chthonic. It was quite a neat divide and quite a well-structured world, and all might have continued in this easy separation had there not been an entire other realm that neither team had paid any attention to whatsoever.

The Afterlife.

And that is where our story begins.

* * *

“Oh, bugger,” Aziraphale said. “Bugger, bugger, bugger.”

Luckily, because he was a relatively minor God on a mountain full of Very Important Deities no one paid all that much attention to him, or to the scroll that he was clutching in his hands, which had suddenly become rather sweaty. He had received the missive moments previously from one of the lesser messenger Gods, who had seemed rather overwhelmed at being tasked with carrying a message directly from Metatron and had almost thrown it at Aziraphale in his panic to get rid of it.

If he had known what it was Aziraphale wouldn't have caught it. Or would have thrown it off the mountain before opening it. Or maybe just thrown himself off. It was a close call.

The scroll was embossed with Metatron’s heavy seal, gleaming gold and catching the light, shining rather annoyingly into Aziraphale’s eyes. He had never been sent a message from him before – why would he have? No one cared much about what a minor God of protection was up to, let alone the great God of prophecy. He had presumed that he if he spent his days flying enough below the radar, that no one would ever really notice him or remember that he wasn’t doing much – but evidently, he was incorrect.

It was there, irrevocable, on his scroll.

Reassignment to Underworld duty.

The Gods had never considered it, when they were dividing things up – back then there had been nothing living on the Earth yet. Maybe the occasional mollusc, if you were going to be picky, but no one really thought much about them other than the God of molluscs, and according to everyone that had met him, he was rather weird. It had only been later, when life had flourished and the Gods had created, that they realised that the natural end point of life was death, and that souls needed to go s_omewhere. _

By the time they realised that the Underworld even existed, it had been an administrative nightmare which neither side had any interest in claiming. There were very tense discussions about whose jurisdiction it fell under. Gods very carefully _did not have arguments _as they debated. The Celestials argued that, since it was conceptually an ‘Under’ world, it should belong to the Gods who ruled the world. Unfortunately, said Chthonic deities were having absolutely none of it, mostly because they had been the ones kicked off the mountains down to earth in the first place.

No one wanted to deal with it.

Eventually, the Celestials had ended up in charge of it, probably because the God of lawyers had ended up on the Chthonic side in the fall (humans hadn’t been created at that point, and therefore neither had lawyers, so she didn’t have much to do but bully Celestials in God-court). They had taken responsibility for it immediately, by pretending it didn’t exist. They had allocated someone to be in charge of it, Aziraphale vaguely remembered, but no one had actually gone down there and taken a look at it.

Evidently, someone had changed their mind.

_Name: Aziraphale_  
Classification: deity, minor  
Duty: protection [unconfirmed]  
Assignment: Underworld administration  
Instructions: proceed immediately to location of new assignment and begin task.

“Bugger,” he repeated one final time, though he wasn’t convinced anyone was actually listening. It was frustratingly vague, but then again he supposed Metatron had never seen the Underworld to be more specific. What exactly was his task, and what was the administrative structure of the Underworld in the bloody first place?

He was not looking forward to finding out for himself.

He continued to stare at the scroll for the entire trip to the Underworld, which involved some rather unpleasant temporal and cross-dimensional shifting that left his stomach in knots and his eyes watering. On the plus side, that did mean that he couldn’t see all that much of the place when he actually did arrive, just a blur of grey and beige around him. Beneath his feet was heavy stone and against his skin was the touch of dry, still air; in the far distance, he could hear the slow, soporific sound of water lapping gently against a shore. Everything smelt vaguely stale.

“You must be the new guy,” came a voice, quite suddenly out of the stillness.

Aziraphale started, and rubbed at his eyes, trying to clear his vision. It took him a moment or two, but things finally swam into focus. The place was strange – it felt like outside, with the dim light of a grey afternoon, but above him was a stone ceiling, not quite close enough to be claustrophobic but close to it. He was facing a wall, stretching out indefinitely into the distance, carved of blocks of stone taller than he was. Who had made them, he wondered, briefly – what primordial force had shaped this barrier?

In front of him was a gap in the wall, informal and wide. The land between it was trodden flat with the footsteps of millions, forming a path that stretched on into the distance across the arid land behind the wall. There was something strange about it, some shimmer of power that made it difficult to look at. Instead, he let his eyes slide to the side, where a figure was sitting on top of the wall. She was staring right at him, dark hair and copper skin, markings in gold etched across her face and arms, jade beads in long strands looped around her. She was strange, and otherworldly, and distinctly _not _a Celestial being.

The weird part about it was that she was clearly not a Chthonic, either.

“Anathema,” she said, swinging her legs slightly. “God of witchcraft, magic, doorways and the dead. Do you have any idea how long I’ve been waiting for someone to turn up and sort this place out?”

Aziraphale hadn’t even known there would be another God down here. He just shook his head dumbly.

She rolled her eyes and hopped down from the wall, landing gracefully, despite the height.

“I suppose I had better show you around.”

* * *

To say that Aziraphale did not like the Underworld was an understatement.

Anathema made for a thorough tour guide. She showed him first the rivers of the Underworld, none of which were particularly pleasant. The Styx first, the river of hatred, encircling the Kingdom seven times, which Aziraphale couldn’t help but feel was a bit of an overkill. The Acheron next – the river of pain – which was awful, full of bones and with a crumbling bank that threatened to topple you in it at any moment. The Lethe – forgetfulness – oozed unpleasantly, nothing like water should, and emitted a strange odour that seemed to settle on the skin and in clothes, lingering long after you had left it. The Cocytus was introduced to him as the river of wailing, and yes, the water did let out eerie screaming sounds. Aziraphale tried very hard not to think about the actual logistics of that.

The Phlegethon was on fire. That just seemed unnecessary.

“Oh, umm, yes. Lovely,” he mumbled, when Anathema looked at him.

She snorted.

“Come on, lets get you inside. There is only one road into the Kingdom of the Dead – makes things a bit easier, but it does lead to traffic jams. We’ve cleared everything for day, so you can get a bit of a sense of it all.”

“One entrance doesn’t seem very practical,” he replied. “Why not have more?”

She shrugged. “Harder to maintain, I suppose. This world is created through need and necessity though – it does what its King wants, and it has never had a King. There are rumours though – that sometimes pathways open in the rock, right when people need them the most, though I don’t know if that is true or not.”

Aziraphale could have done with an emergency escape route, he thought to himself as they left the rivers behind them and turned back to the gates. This place was horrible.

“Does it get better?” he asked, his voice a bit hoarse, as they reached the fields of dead grass.

“I’m afraid not.”

Through the gates was the main thoroughfare to the dead, and to his surprise, there were a number of other Gods waiting to meet him. The Gods of Anxiety stood alongside Grief and Agony; Disease huddled with Old Age and Hunger; War and Discord and the Furies whispered as he passed; twins brothers, Death and Sleep, went hand-in-hand; Need stood alone, skeletal arms reaching for something that only he could see. All of them were like Anathema – neither Celestial nor Chthonic. Belonging to neither side. Something else entirely.

None of them looked particularly happy to see him, and he rather felt that the feeling was mutual. 

His eye was caught by the tall boughs and huge limbs of a distant tree. Other than the dead grass beneath his feet, it was the only other form of plant life that he could see.

“What is that?”

“That is the Elm tree.”

“Oh, umm. I see.” Aziraphale squinted at in, and in particular at the rather strange looking lumps that seemed attached to its limbs. “And, umm. What is hanging from those branches?”

Anathema shot him a look. “Those are the Oneiroi. Did… did they tell you nothing about all of this before they sent you down here?”

Aziraphale shook his head, trying hard not to look too embarrassed. “What are they?”

She was frowning now.

“The Oneiroi? They are false dreams. If you touch them, you are trapped forever by their spell.”

“Oh. Um. That’s nice. Should they really be out here then, where anyone could just wander up and fall into them?”

She stared at him. She didn’t seem to quite know what to say to that, which wasn’t very reassuring.

“I think we’ll skip the bestiary for now,” she said, in the end. She sounded a little faint.

Aziraphale was not particularly upset. The tree had been unsettling enough – he wasn’t sure his nerves could handle the great monstrous beasts of the Underworld quite yet.

“There is one other person you have to meet,” Anathema said, pulling herself together. “I have to warn you, he isn’t the most pleasant. Eyes like fire, wild hair, filthy cloak, that kind of thing. Some people think he does it deliberately to cultivate the image – to be honest, I think he is just a bit dirty. Indoor plumbing isn’t the best down here. Terrible water pressure.”

“You know,” Aziraphale replied. “You’re really not selling the place to me.”

“No,” Anathema said. “I don’t suppose I am.”

He waited for the apology. It was not forthcoming.

“So who is it I have to meet?”

“The Ferryman,” she muttered, glancing around the Gods still hovering at the side of the path. “He brings the souls of the dead across the river to the Kingdom. He is of vital importance and is an absolute pain. Where the hell…”

“Witch!” came a scratchy voice that probably had great aspirations to booming, but hadn’t quite made the cut. A God shambled out from behind the crowd, looking even worse than Anathema had described. Her arms were folded, looking decidedly unimpressed.

“Witch!” he repeated, a little shaky this time, as if he had been waiting for a response that he had not been given. “What gives you the right to summon me from my task?”

“New God,” she replied, hooking a thumb in Aziraphale’s direction. “Supposed to be in charge. Sent from upstairs.”

The Ferryman blinked. “Oh. Looks like a bit of a pansy, doesn’t he?”

Anathema pulled a face, as if Aziraphale wasn’t even there. He was half tempted to apologise and leave, just to make things a bit less awkward, but before he could she turned back to him.

“Aziraphale, this is Shadwell. He is horrible, don’t bother talking to him at all unless he stops doing his job and you need to fire him, in which case do so immediately and hire someone competent.”

Shadwell grumbled, and glared some more at Aziraphale, looking entirely unimpressed. Aziraphale couldn’t really blame him. He was feeling increasingly out of his depth, and borderline terrified. He had no clue how he had ended up here, or even what he was supposed to do. Anathema must have caught the panic on his face, because she hooked an arm through his, and started to drag him away.

“Come on, you,” she said. “Let's get you inside.”

Further down the path, appearing as if from nowhere, were a vast pair of iron gates, dull in the grey light. They seemed to suck in the light around them, making them appear looming, and rather intimidating. Fortunately, Anathema did not let him hesitate – she pulled him bodily through them, into a vast stone courtyard. The stone flags beneath his feet were dark, and cracked. He stared at his feet, hoping that if he did everything else would go away. Around the courtyard were huge, looming buildings, pale grey and imposing, dark open doorways looking like gaping mouths.

“That one is the palace,” Anathema said, pointing at a building – they all looked rather similar to Aziraphale. “All the others are the administrative buildings. But you’ll know all about those, at least.”

Aziraphale’s mouth fell open. Unfortunately, no words actually came out of it.

She bowed to him, a short and sharp thing that made him rather uncomfortable and disappeared almost immediately. Aziraphale forced himself to take a deep breath and walk towards the palace. Surely it couldn’t be that bad.

He was wrong, of course. It would have been entirely counter to the rest of the day if he had been correct.

The palace was made of the same dark stone as the floor of the courtyard, designed with countless vast rooms that seemed to contain absolutely nothing but dust and the pervading sense of abandonment that he himself was starting to feel. The windows were tall and paned with fine glass, but the weak light outside did little to alleviate the pervading sense of gloom that seemed to have settled over the entire place. He wandered, lonely and more than a little miserable until he found himself in another courtyard. This was a small, internal one, tucked away, presumably for the private use of the occupant of the palace. The stonework was paler here, almost white, and there was a long bench running down one side of it. In the centre was the skeletal frame of a long-dead tree, and beneath his feet shed leaves let out a rasping sound that cut through the silence like a knife.

He sank onto the bench, took a deep breath, and forced himself not to scream.

* * *

Aziraphale had expected things to be a bit of a mess, but never in his wildest dreams had he thought it would be as bad as this. He spent his first week mindlessly staring at the chaos, trying and failing to come up with ways to fix it. The main problem was that the issues, the things he had to fix, were all incomprehensibly large. There were millions of unprocessed souls, animal and insect and fish and human, and everything was all waiting in one line, no semblance of organisation. There was no clear method of processing, and the strange ethereal spirits that were trying to do so clearly could not differentiate between types of spirits, or good and bad, so could only stare at their files in confusion for the longest time before rubber-stamping them with either a positive or negative sign. And that was another thing! There were two vast holding rooms beyond processing, one filled with ‘positive’ signs, for the souls deemed good, and another one filled with the ‘negative’. But there was no real difference between the two other than that the ‘negative’ room was always slightly too warm and smelt a little stale. They called it a holding room, but Aziraphale had absolutely no idea what they were supposedly holding these souls _for, _or why nearly all of the lobsters had been designated evil.

The system wasn’t working, that much was clear, but he was entirely overwhelmed by the mess of it. The wraiths kept staring at him hopefully, their shoulders slumping when he quickly walked away, avoiding having to admit that he didn’t know what to do.

And that was the worst part of it! Everyone seemed to assume that he would know everything, that he should be able to fix it – they were treating him like he was _meant _to be down here, rather than just an administrative patch up who was here against his will. It was strange, and deeply uncomfortable.

It was on one day, as he was carefully avoiding eyes and trying to temper down the panic, that he accidentally walked into the relics hall – a great chamber full of indeterminate things that were apparently of great importance to the Underworld, even though they were all covered in dust and had apparently never been used. And by walked in, he meant fell, tripping over the doorframe and crashing into the one closest to the door, knocking it right off its pedestal and onto the floor, where it smashed. It had been a lovely thing, made of metal and jade, and as he read the little card that had once sat next to it he felt his heart sink.

_‘The Scales of Justice’_. Oh dear. He wasn’t entirely convinced he knew what they were, but they sounded rather important.

Rather than do the mature thing, which was to report the damage and get on with things, Aziraphale promptly panicked, and ran away. He fled the palace and the courtyard and the grey dullness of the administrative buildings and their endless lines of souls. He was definitely not avoiding responsibilities, or hiding from anyone that might ask him questions that he didn’t know the answer to. He was walking very quickly (because it was healthy, not because someone might catch up) when he saw something that he had never seen before, which was rather unusual in the grey and monotone landscape.

A door, cut into the rock, small enough that you might not have noticed it unless you had been panic-staring at the walls in terror at the idea of eternity doing the same thankless administrative chores. He slipped through the gap before he had a chance to think, finding himself in a narrow tunnel. Pathways out of the Kingdom of the Dead, he thought to himself, recalling Anathema’s words. Appearing to those who needed them the most. He felt the sandy dirt beneath his bare feet, and he was gone before he even had a chance to think it through, slipping through the gap.

It was cool in there, darker, and the path twisted this way and that at a gentle incline. There was something still and calm about it, as if no one had ever passed this way before, and he wondered if Anathema had been right – did these places really only appear when they were needed to? It seemed too whimsical for the mighty Kingdom of the Dead, and he wasn’t really sure why it would do this for him anyway. He didn’t belong here, after all – he was a Celestial, a minor protection deity without a true purpose or duty, just put here to fill in an administrative gap.

He walked for what might have been hours and what might have been minutes as he told himself this, until it began to feel different. The air began to feel fresher, cleaner. A breeze was moving against his skin, movement the likes of which he had not felt since he had come down to the Underworld. The light was getting better too, brighter, more like the actual sun – and then, suddenly, there was another doorway, and-

The living world.

It stretched out before him, shining in the sunlight of early morning. Oh, he had seen it from the mountains of course, stretching out in blurry swatches of colour, but that had been without detail and focus, without the _specifics._

The exit was a small doorway in a cliff face, he realised as he stepped out, the side of a craggy mountain surrounded by a forest. He had seen forests, admired them from afar, but he had never really understood what those vast stretches of green would look like up close. He didn’t know there were so many types of tree, for a start – that some would have silver bark, and others would have leaves that were purple-red. He had not realised that there would be plants underfoot, or that birdsong would sound so lovely, or even that the air would smell the way it did, sweet and full of earthy decay.

He should not be going out into the world of the Chthonic Gods. This was not his land, his territory.

A cool breeze kissed the back of his neck, blowing from the tunnel.

Then again, the Underworld wasn’t really his home either.

He took a step forward, and no thunderbolt came from the sky to smite him.

He took another, and smiled.

* * *

Aziraphale was quite pleased with himself. Not only had he found his way to the surface, nothing had killed him yet. He had been wandering for hours, soaking in the feeling of it, the sun against his skin and the leaves under his feet. The other Celestials had always told them that the earth was an evil and corrupt place, full of the Gods thrown off their mountains for the blasphemy and sinful ways, but this place was quiet, and serene, and lovely. Maybe they just hadn’t seen this bit of the earth before?

Then, through the trees, came a voice, loud and angry, enough to make Aziraphale jump.

“You know what? There is nothing acceptable about this. Do you really think I would stand for this? Were you _intending _to disappoint me?”

Aziraphale dithered for a moment, all his immediate responses set to flight-mode. He would have listened to them and run away, had he not realised quite suddenly that there was no response. Who on earth was speaking, and who were they speaking to? He crept closer until he could make out the shape of a figure

There, half-tangled in a mass of ivy, stood a God… and no one else. 

He held one small pink flower between his fingertips, and was glaring at it with a level of fury normally not directed at innocent plant life. He appeared to be… lecturing the plants.

“Honestly, I give you chance after chance. I don’t ask much! All I want is for you to grow, and-”

A stick cracked under Aziraphale’s foot, and the God whirled round.

“Who the hell are you?” Fat flowers were blooming around his feet, bright begonias that curled around his ankles possessively. His hair was red, his skin was pale, and his eyes… oh, his eyes. Aziraphale had never seen anything like them before.

Of course he hadn’t, he realised suddenly. This was a Chthonic God. Bloody hell.

“Oh goodness, I am sorry, please excuse me,” he sputtered, trying to move backwards with as much grace and speed as possible, away from the God he had unwittingly interrupted. Oh, this would be his luck – first time out on earth, accidentally dismembered by an evil God that Aziraphale had actually wa_lked over to. _

“No, wait – oi, come back!” the God was calling after him, but Aziraphale was not about to stop and see what he wanted. Unfortunately, the world seemed to disagree with him, and promptly used a tree root to trip him up. He lay face down in the dirt for a moment, stunned, until he registered footsteps coming up to him, at which point he made a rather half-hearted attempt to crawl away.

“Look, I’m… are you afraid of me?” the other God sounded rather bewildered. Aziraphale used the moment to roll over onto his back, so at least he would see what was coming. Instead of the large and grotesque weapon he had been imagining, the God just had his hands folded across his chest, staring down at Aziraphale with a look of amused confusion on his face.

“I… umm… well, I suppose – that is to say, aren’t you one of _them_?” Aziraphale managed to say. Not quite his most eloquent, but he supposed he could be forgiven.

The God was dressed in a rather dramatic series of flappy bits of black fabric draped over him (Aziraphale wasn’t quite sure how they were all staying together, let alone staying _on, _but he was glad they were, because if there was one thing right now he couldn’t deal with it would be his possible-murderer accidentally flashing him). The God was smiling a bit now, the corner of his mouth twisting upwards, as if he was as unsure of what to make of Aziraphale as Aziraphale was to make of him.

“That probably depends on what ‘one of them’ is.”

“A Chthonic God,” Aziraphale said, blinking. “One of the earth-bound deities.”

The God smirked. “Was it the plants that gave it away? It’s always the plants.”

He offered Aziraphale a hand, as if to pull him up, but Aziraphale just stared at it owlishly. What on earth was going on?

“I’m not supposed to talk to you!”

The God did not withdraw the hand.

“Are you not? Oh dear. You’re not doing a very good job of it.”

Things were getting a bit awkward now, so Aziraphale let him help pull him to his feet. He didn’t seem particularly threatening, though he had been warned in the past that Chthonic Gods were wily beings, full of tricks. He dusted himself down, hoping that the Underworld cleaning service would be able to get the grass stains off.

“You’re not supposed to talk to me either!” he reminded the God. “We’re hereditary enemies!”

“Why, because you’re a Celestial?” the God asked, looking a little confused. “You don’t feel much like a Celestial.”

Aziraphale could feel the gentle push of powers against his own, far softer and kinder than other Gods normally did. It was a normal way to check for Godhood, for powers and strength, but normally people were a lot rougher with Aziraphale, correctly assuming that a God with such limited strength could do nothing in response.

“Well, I’ve been reassigned lately,” he replied.

“Reassigned?”

“Yes. To the Underworld.” He expected this God to look as disgusted as a Celestial would at such an unpleasant assignment, but he just looked curious.

“Then what are you doing here?” he asked.

Aziraphale cleared his throat. “I ran away.”

“Permanently?”

“Well, no. But I accidentally broke the scales of justice so I thought I had better… make myself scarce. For a while at least.”

“You did what?” the God was grinning now, wide, his eyes dancing with amusement.

“I knocked them over,” he admitted.

“Can’t have been very sturdy then,” the God told him, in a voice that was clearly trying very hard to be reassuring. “Probably weren’t all that important anyway, if they would just break like that.”

“No, they were a bit flimsy,” Aziraphale replied, and despite himself he realised that he was smiling too, and feeling quite a bit better about the whole affair.

“Sorry, what was your name?” the other God asked, and Aziraphale blinked. He probably shouldn’t be standing around making introductions, but then again, the God hadn’t really done anything threatening.

“My name? Oh, Aziraphale.”

“I’m Crowley. Plants, growth, that sort of thing.”

Crowley. It wasn’t a name he was familiar with, but Aziraphale had never really paid attention to the names of the Chthonic deities, other than the greatest and strongest, who had led the rebellion to get themselves kicked off the mountains. There were thousands of Gods on both sides whose names were never remembered.

“Oh, sorry,” he said, realising that he had been staring, and that he was supposed to reply in kind. It was only polite, given that Crowley had told him his powers. “Protection. Sort of. Never been fully confirmed.”

“Really? How so?” Crowley asked, with genuine interest.

Aziraphale shrugged. “Never manifested anything properly.”

“Oh well. It happens.” Normally people responded to this sort of information with distain, or worse, pity. Some Gods never quite came into themselves – there was a sense of what their powers were about in the edges of their magic, but they did not develop any specific gifts beyond the basic ones that they all had. Aziraphale was one such God, normally overlooked and disregarded, but Crowley was still just looking at him, his expression barely changed.

“I suppose so,” he replied. It felt quite nice, not to be completely ignored by someone the moment they found out about him.

Crowley flashed him a grin.

“You’re still talking to me, you know.”

“I… well, you’re still talking to me as well!” Aziraphale sputtered, but Crowley just shrugged in response.

“I didn’t have any issue with it to begin with.”

It probably didn’t matter, in the grand scheme of things, did it? No one would watch Aziraphale, and even if they did, why would they care if he spoke to a Chthonic deity now and again? He had been irrelevant enough to get sent on Underworld duty – if one of them did decide to torture or dismember him, none of the other Celestials would care that much anyway.

“I should get going back,” he said. Crowley’s smile faded a little.

“You’re going to come back?” the other God asked, and Aziraphale but his lower lip.

“I… probably shouldn’t.”

Crowley was watching him carefully, with those strange and lovely eyes. “Yeah, but who is going to stop you?”

Aziraphale looked up at the sky. It was much further away here than it had ever seemed to be on the mountains. There was more space here, he realised. Less of the crushing weight of obligation and expectation that he had always felt as a member of the Celestial host.

“I suppose I can make my own rules now, can’t I?”

“Exactly,” Crowley said, reaching out and tapping a single finger against Aziraphale’s hand. “So… come back?”

Aziraphale smiled, a sudden flush across his neck.

“Okay. I will. Are you normally around these parts?”

Crowley ducked his head, as if he were a little embarrassed.

“I can be,” he said, his voice warm. “I will be, if I get to see you again.”

* * *

Crowley hadn’t been entirely sure that the strange sort-of-Celestial would show up again, but to his surprise, several days later, he reappeared from between the trees. Crowley had been hovering around the place, trying to see if he could work out where Aziraphale had come from, with no success – he supposed it was rather inevitable that the route to the Underworld would be hidden from all those who were not supposed to be there.

He liked Aziraphale. He was interesting, and far different from many of the other Gods that he had known – most of the ones he had met he disliked, which was why he spent so much of his time tucked away in far-off corners of the earth like this one, avoiding all communication and occasionally spending weeks at a time in his snake-form. But he was willing to forgo the comfort of that form for Aziraphale – though it had been very amusing to watch him flinch the first time Crowley had shifted in front of him.

But Aziraphale had a good sense of humour and asked lots of interesting questions about the world, particularly when he forgot that he was supposed to hate all Chthonic deities.

Crowley had known many Celestials in his time, from when he had lived on the mountains and from when he had been kicked off them – not that he had really done anything wrong, as far as he was concerned. Aziraphale wasn’t like any of the others he had known. He was smaller, not just in size but in… well, everything. He seemed to curl in on himself as if he was waiting to be told off. It made Crowley a little irate, if he thought about it too hard.

Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that his Godhood was undeveloped. Crowley had come into his own powers a long time ago now. He had been one of the first. He had been lying in the dirt, in the crater he had made from when he had been thrown from the mountains, but unlike so many others he had not been staring at the sky, filled with grief, wondering how it had all come to this. Not him – he had been distracted by the dirt on his skin, the smell of it, the feeling of _something, _deep below him in the earth.

He knew what that was now, of course – it was the potential of plants, the power of them, the power that was his to twist and shape and bring out into the daylight. When the other fallen Gods had been trying to work out what to do next, he had been chasing that feeling, and so his Godhood had come to him earlier than it had to others. He knew who he was, on a deep a visceral level.

Aziraphale didn’t have that knowledge, that awareness – he didn’t know that part of him. Crowley had met other Gods that had never come to their full powers, here and there, and he knew what they felt like. Aziraphale didn’t feel like that, not at all. It took him a while to work it out, as Aziraphale’s visits became more and more frequent, as they relaxed a little around each other, as Crowley’s own power grew more familiar with the taste of Aziraphale’s.

His power… it was there, under the surface. It was tempered, as if something was holding it back, preventing it from growing, from turning it into what it needed to be. It didn’t feel Chthonic, or Celestial, not really.

Aziraphale was something else, something waiting to become.

“What are you thinking about?” Aziraphale asked him. They knew each other well enough now that they were sat side-by-side, and that he could clearly see that Crowley was distracted.

“The Underworld,” Crowley told him, and it was only something of a lie. “Will you let me go back with you, one day? I want to see it, to see the Underworld. I want to know what it is like.”

“It is not exactly the nicest place for a picnic,” Aziraphale answered. He was watching Crowley out of the corner of his eyes, and must have seen something in his expression, some glimmer of disappointment, because his shoulder’s sagged, and he made a strange flinch with his hand, an aborted movement in Crowley’s direction.

“You can still come though,” he hastened to add. “Whenever you like. If you really do want to see it, I mean.”

“Promise?” Crowley asked, plum blossoms curling around his wrists. He shook them loose absentmindedly, and they fell to the ground, setting out roots through the earth.

“Promise,” he replied.

He knew Aziraphale would keep his word – he wasn’t the kind of person to consider that he had the option not to. But he was worried, rubbing his hands together, frowning in that way that made Crowley want to reach over and smooth the lines between his eyebrows with his fingertip.

“Just… don’t judge me for it, will you?” he asked.

Crowley shook his head. “Never,” he told him.

Aziraphale took a deep breath.

“Okay,” he said. “Come on then. Better now than never.”

* * *

Crowley was quiet as Aziraphale led him to the cliff-face, only speaking when it – and the came – came into sight.

“I have walked past this rock face many times,” he remarked. “And there has never been a tunnel here.”

Aziraphale shrugged. “I suppose you are only supposed to see it if you are meant to.”

Crowley raised his eyebrows at that, but did not reply. He followed Aziraphale into the tunnel without question, which seemed to widen after a moment to allow the two of them to walk side-by-side. Aziraphale was a little concerned about that – he wasn’t quite sure why it was being that hospitable, or what it might want in return. They followed the path of it in silence, until eventually it let them out, right outside the main courtyard of the palace and administrative buildings.

“This is…” Crowley said, unable to finish his sentence.

“Yup,” Aziraphale replied. “Bleak, isn’t it?”

“Show me around?”

He supposed there was no way to try and sugar coat it – the Underworld was not a pleasant place, and soon enough Crowley would realise that and want to leave, just like any sensible God would. He showed him the courtyard, the tracks worn in the stone by the passage of so many years of souls. Crowley just nodded at it, his eyes narrowed and assessing.

“There are pots over there,” he remarked. “What grows in them?”

“Nothing that I’ve ever seen,” Aziraphale replied, but it was to Crowley’s back – he was already walking over to them, placing the palms of his hands against the dry and dusty earth contained inside them.

“Cypresses,” Crowley told him, after a minute. “They… they haven’t grown here before, but they could. Or they should. It is strange. It is the magic of the Kingdom, I think. It is waiting to be told what to do, and it thinks it should have cypresses.”

“Should it?” Aziraphale asked, and Crowley shook his head immediately.

“Cypresses are for death, for mourning. Apt, yes. Thematically appropriate, of course. But a bit ghoulish, isn’t it? No need to rub it in. You might as well have something bright. Delphiniums, maybe. Those are nice. Tall and pretty, blues and whites and pinks. A bit of colour, you know?”

“And what do delphiniums mean, if Cypresses stand for death?”

Crowley finally looked up, his eyes bright. “Levity, joy. Good things for bad times.”

“That does sound quite nice,” Aziraphale said, and he might have continued, but small sprouts were pushing from the earth, tiny splashes of green. The earth was getting darker too, healthier.

“How did you do that?” he asked, in awe, and did not spot the curiosity in Crowley’s eyes, the confusion as he glanced down at the soil.

“Come on,” Crowley said. “What is next on the tour? These buildings look like they contain terrible and boring things.”

Aziraphale tore his eyes from the pots and their new life, and led Crowley through to his least favourite halls, where the endless souls of the dead waited. Endless hoards of them, in queues that wove through rooms that had expanded far beyond their physical limits in order to hold them all. It was a dim, grey space. The small windows did nothing to illuminate rooms that had been stretched so far, and scant candlelight flickered eerily. The floor beneath the bare feet (and paws, and hoofs, and so on) was sandy earth, and the ceilings were low. Aziraphale led him along the length of several rooms before they reached the wraiths who were currently on duty.

“What is all of this?” Crowley asked, and Aziraphale sighed.

“Unprocessed claimants.”

“Unpro… do you mean people?”

Aziraphale sighed. “Among other things – and trust me, I wish I didn’t.”

Crowley looked up and down, eyes following the rows of people. “Why are they all queuing?”

Aziraphale wrung his hands. “They never bothered sending anyone down here! The poor wraiths were doing their best, but they weren’t designed for this level of administration. They’re overwhelmed – we have such a huge backlog. We have to go through their entire file, there is a spreadsheet involved…. It’s a nightmare. None of the wraiths can read properly, or understand the difference between good and evil… and they all hate lobsters for some reason.”

“You have to process every soul?”

“Even the bloody insects, and molluscs.”

“And the children?”

Aziraphale nodded, glumly. Crowley looked devastated.

“You can’t… I mean, they expect you to judge children?”

“All things should be judged, apparently.”

“Not kids,” Crowley said. “That’s just unkind.”

Aziraphale shrugged. “Trust me, I know. I don’t know who designed this original system, but it is an absolute mess, and I have no idea how to go about fixing it. The other Underworld Gods are no help, either. They just blink at me in confusion every time I mention it.”

Next came the positive and negative rooms. Crowley seemed even more disturbed by those, and Aziraphale couldn’t blame him. Souls stood in regimented order, staring blankly in one direction without moving – in both rooms.

“Well, this is miserable. Is this for the good people or the bad people?”

“This one is for the good people – though there isn’t much of a difference between them.”

Crowley shivered. “Let's get out of here.”

Aziraphale smiled to himself, a little wryly. Here it was, then. He would take Crowley out to the courtyard and he would wish him well and then ask to leave – and no doubt, having seen what Aziraphale was in charge of, he would have no interest in spending time with him out on the earth anymore. It upset him a little more than he was willing to admit, but there was nothing to be done. He led Crowley out, and turned to him, expecting an expression of anxiousness, of guilt, of disgust.

Instead, Crowley was looking around them, at the tall grey columns and the grey stone ceiling and the cold grey floor. Even in the dim light of the Underworld he seemed to shine, his hair and eyes the brightest thing in the place.

“Why… why do it their way?” he asked, and Aziraphale blinked. He had so thoroughly prepared himself for the ‘so sorry, I have to dash’ talk that he was momentarily thrown.

“What?”

“Well, I mean… you’re in charge down here, right?” Crowley asked, looking now at him, carefully.

Aziraphale nodded, a little hesitantly, as if he himself wasn’t entirely sure of that fact.

“Well then. Can’t you just do it your way?”

Aziraphale took a breath, sharp and aborted, other words on his tongue that died suddenly before he had a chance to say them out loud.

“I don’t really think I know what my way is,” he said in the end, hating himself for how ineffectual they felt.

“Oh,” Crowley said, and then shrugged. “Well, then maybe we should figure that out.”

“We?”

A small light of hope, in his chest. Crowley smiled.

“Sure. I’ll help.”

Aziraphale shook his head. “You don’t want to stay down here.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Crowley replied, the edge of a smile around his mouth, warm and invited.

“Really?”

Crowley patted his shoulder gently. “Well, it looks like you need my help.”

Joy bubbled up in Aziraphale’s chest, thankfulness that he would not be alone in this, that Crowley was not going back to the surface right now, that someone actually wanted to _help. _He was smiling, so wide that it was already starting to hurt his cheeks.

“I’ll show you the palace,” was all he said, because thanks were too difficult to say out loud. Crowley was watching him though, and there was something in his eyes that told Aziraphale that he understood.

“Fancy,” Crowley said, as they made their way towards it. Aziraphale swatted at his arm.

“Shush. It’s a pretty miserable place.”

“Well, why don’t we start there?”

Aziraphale blinked. “Really?”

“The palace is the centre of a Kingdom, right? The seat of its ruler? And more to the point, it is where you spend your free time. You can’t expect to make positive changes if you wake up feeling terrible every day.”

Aziraphale frowned at him, thrown. “Gods don’t sleep.”

Crowley nudged him, and Aziraphale didn’t even mind that the shadow of the palace was drawing nearer, that he would soon have to enter that bleak place – and besides, maybe it wouldn’t have to be bleak for much longer.

“We can if we want to.”

* * *

“Wow, you weren’t kidding about this place,” Crowley said as Aziraphale led him through the palace doors. It had not improved since Aziraphale’s first day – if anything, it had grown worse, slumping in on itself as if it was as disappointed in Aziraphale as he was in himself.

“Not the cosiest, is it?” he said, with a rueful smile. Crowley shrugged.

“Good décor,” he remarked, as they moved through one empty, bleak room to another.

“Are you serious?” Aziraphale replied, incredulous. Crowley had that look on his face, the one that meant it was probably a joke even if Aziraphale didn’t know how to read it. He was cheerful, but he could feel the place weighing on him, sapping that energy. He caught Crowley watching him from the corner of his eye, assessing.

“Big windows,” Crowley remarked.

“Not worth much when there is no light,” Aziraphale replied, trying to smile. Crowley strode over to them, pulling the heavy curtains back more thoroughly, poking his nose close to the glass in an attempt to judge the non-existent sky outside.

“Does the sun… wait, is there even a sun? No, there isn’t, is there? Where does the light come from? Do you even have night-time?”

Aziraphale shook his head, even though Crowley could not see him.

“Can you change it?” Crowley spun on his heel, staring at him.

“What?”

“Make it brighter. Or better yet, make it imitate a real day. And a real night, for that matter. Moonlight is beautiful, no reason you shouldn’t have it just because you’re stuck below ground.”

“I wouldn’t even know how to begin,” Aziraphale managed to say around his disbelief.

Crowley was watching him, smile at one corner of his mouth, one eyebrow raised, waiting.

“You’re the one who grew those plants out there, why don’t you try,” he said accusingly, though it did not stop Crowley from smiling.

“I’m a creator, sure – but we’re not trying to create anything. We’re trying to change something. No reason I should be any better at it than you.”

This confused Aziraphale, possibly more than anything else could have done. “Why would this place listen to me?”

Crowley sighed, and glanced up at the ceiling, as if asking for it to give him strength. “Oh, try and stop complaining.”

Aziraphale was going to protest, but Crowley’s eyes were full of belief, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to. Instead he closed his eyes, stretched out the feeling of his powers to its limits, and… pushed. It took a moment, but he could feel something, something wrapped all around them, a strength and an unknowable magic, something greater than anything he had ever known. The Kingdom of the Dead, the place itself imbued with its own power, opening up to him. and all he had to do was reach, touch just a little, here and there, and-

“There you go – look at that.”

Aziraphale opened his eyes. Outside, the sky was brighter, the air lighter. It was now the colours of a warm summer evening, and without knowing how he found that he knew instinctively that it matched the daylight outside, and that when night came to the earth so too would it come down here. He had done that. He had changed the very fabric of the Underworld.

Or perhaps, as it would be more accurate to say, it allowed him to change it.

“It looks better in here already, doesn’t it?” Crowley said, and Aziraphale nodded absentmindedly.

“We need to get rid of the damn dust next.”

Crowley was standing very close to him, he realised. Close enough that he could feel the warmth of his body, the press of his magic.

“Musty in here,” Crowley said, with a hint of mischief. “Shame there isn’t a breeze.”

Aziraphale closed his eyes. A moment later, and the windows blew open, a strong wind following, lifting the dust motes and sending them scattering around the room. He opened his eyes again and laughed, full of the joys of magic, of power that had never been in his reach before. He moved from room to room, Crowley at his heels, and each space he came to changed around him. The dark walls lightened, the sagging ceilings straightened themselves out, the floors polished themselves, the curtains shook themselves free of dust and turned a pleasant, airy white to match the walls. Furniture appeared in each room, solid wood and comfortable cushions. 

There was laughter in Crowley’s voice. “Well, at least you can accessorise anything with a white wall.”

Aziraphale smiled at him, and the accessories of the room they were in all turned the red of Crowley’s hair.

“Careful, you’ll give me a complex.”

“Are you doing this?” Aziraphale laughed. “Are you helping me? I have never had a power like this before.”

“No,” Crowley said. “This is nothing to do with me, my dear. Perhaps the palace was just ready for a bit of attention.”

“It looks better, doesn’t it?” Aziraphale said, slowing. This was the last room, he realised – he stared through the open doorways to the ones he had already been through. Everything was bright, was beautiful, was the kind of place he might want to actually live in. He was tempted to walk back through them all, to see them all again – but Crowley had spotted something through the doorways.

“What is through there?”

A hint of stone, of dead leaves on the ground.

“A garden – well, sort of.”

“Now you’re speaking my language.”

Aziraphale was reluctant to go back there, when his mood was as bright as it was, but Crowley was already setting off, and he trailed after him. The bright light had improved the sight of the garden, he though when he peeked over Crowley’s shoulder, and the breeze seemed to have blown away the worst of the dead leaves. It looked a little prettier now – but still dead.

“What are you thinking?” he asked, watching Crowley’s face carefully. He was frowning, staring at the tree, but when he heard Aziraphale’s voice he seemed to snap out of it, turning back to him.

“It’s not ready yet,” he replied.

Aziraphale pulled a face. “What does that mean?”

“Some things can only grow when they want to, when they are supposed to. And this one isn’t ready yet,” Crowley replied, with a strange look back at the tree.

The light was dimming, Aziraphale realised: the sky was slowly taking on the purple-red hues of a sunset, despite the fact that there was no sun. 

“Look at that,” Crowley said, noticing too. “Your first evening. Fancy seeing if we can make this place prepare some dinner?”

“Gods don’t need to eat,” Aziraphale replied, nonplussed, and for the first time Crowley laughed, throwing his head back.

“You really don’t know anything about self-indulgence, do you? Come on, I’ll show you. I have a feeling that you’ll be a big fan of food once you get the hang of it.”


	2. Chapter 2

It turns out, Aziraphale really _did _enjoy food. He felt a vague sense of guilt about it for the first few plates, given that he did not technically _need _to eat, but Crowley was very reassuring about it all. He seemed quite delighted in fact and kept pushing dishes at Aziraphale after they had convinced the old kitchens to start preparing things for them.

It was nice to have some company, he thought over the next few days. They didn’t seem to do all that much – Crowley just wandered around, dragging Aziraphale with him, looking at the idiosyncratic elements of the Kingdom of the Dead and occasionally pushing Aziraphale to reach out and feel the power of the Underworld again. It was getting easier and easier to do it, as if the place was getting used to him. Sometimes he found himself doing things without even meaning to, shifting stones and moving things around, as if the power was running through him, using him as a conduit. It didn’t feel invasive, though – it gave him an inexplicable and indescribable contentedness, as if that power occupied a small and hidden place inside of himself that he hadn’t even realised had been empty.

Anathema seemed quite entertained by the two of them. On occasion she would follow them around as they surveyed the Kingdom, Aziraphale just as in the dark about what they were doing as she was. Crowley took everything in with an assessing eye as she filled them in on the history and features of the place. Everything Aziraphale knew had been taught to him by her, after all.

Crowley seemed particularly interested in two things: the plants, and the stories about the King of the Underworld.

The plants made sense – they were his trade, as much a part of him as Anathema’s charms are to her. The King of the Underworld was a whole other matter.

“So, there is a prophecy?” he pressed, and Anathema rolled her eyes.

“There is always a prophecy,” she answered. “You know that. But yes, there is, even if the Chthonic and Celestial Gods have never heard about it. One day a God will come and the Kingdom will be his, and we will be a side of our own, and so on.”

“Interesting,” Crowley said, before his attention appeared to be caught by a stunted shrub nearby. He immediately left the path to approach it, and with a small sigh, Anathema waved Aziraphale off to follow him, staying firmly on the path.

“What have you found?” he asked, Crowley kneeling in the dry dirt.

“Wormwood. And this is nightshade, growing next to it.” he was touching the leaves gently,

“Why do I get the feeling those don’t have nice meanings?”

“Wormwood stands for absence, nightshade for truth. I think these dead stems used to be pansies, too – sadness. Whoever did the original landscaping here was not a cheerful chap.”

Crowley was already smoothing the dirt, it turning darker and richer under his palms. He had done this enough times now that Aziraphale should have been used to it, but he still found himself watching, absolutely fascinated, as the plants shifted, shivered. Crowley shot them a rather unimpressed look at they immediately quietened, changing under his assessing gaze, the shrub twisting and growing and the nightshade shedding its purple flowers, its leaves shifting and then bursting forth with spiky red flowers instead.

“There,” Crowley said, satisfied with himself once the plants had finally stopped. They were quite clearly different things now, and Aziraphale waited patiently, knowing that Crowley would tell him what they were when he was ready.

“Elderflower,” he said, indicating the former wormwood. It looked a little sickly, but sometimes they did for the first few minutes before they settled into themselves. Apparently it was an flora-based identity crisis, but fortunately, plants did not have the imagination to sustain them for very long.

“Why that one?”

Crowley shrugged.

“I’m not sure really. I supposed I was just feeling a bit sorry for all these souls. The other one is allspice, for compassion. That seems like an important thing to have, doesn’t it?”

Aziraphale nodded, and offered Crowley a hand, helping him back to his feet.

The Underworld was an entirely different place with Crowley. All the things that had once scared him seemed better with Crowley’s wry commentary, and the place was starting to look a little friendlier with every plant he grew or changed. He was a charming distraction, white clover wound in his red hair, presenting Aziraphale with amethyst flowers. He found their wanderings enjoyable: even the flaming river didn’t seem to bad anymore. He enjoyed these explorations so much that he did not even notice how far they had wandered until Anathema remarked on it.

“We’re reaching the far limits of the Kingdom,” Anathema commented, and Aziraphale was about to suggest that they turn around, but before he could there was a great vibration from under their feet. There was no sound, just pervading silence, but the earth cracked, and from those gaps seeped a darkness, a blackness so absolute it looked like nothing he had ever seen before.

“What is that?” Crowley said, and his skin was cold as Aziraphale tugged at his wrist, pulling him back, tucking him behind him, alongside Anathema. That left him out in front, he realised, but he didn’t have time to worry too much about that. The darkness was pooling towards them now, somewhere between smoke and liquid, bringing with it the spiced scent of myrrh, the smell of funerals and mourning, heavy and choking on the air. It took him to a whole other place, to a darkness beyond time, and for a moment all he could see were the early constellations, the first stars, whirring away from him into an endless chasm.

But then Anathema was plucking the back of his robes, and he was back in his own body, standing like a wall in front of two other gods.

“Erebus,” she was saying, but Aziraphale did not know what that meant. And then the darkness was on them, seeping into every space, until there was no light left, and Aziraphale couldn’t even see his own hands. It was pressing at him, prickling at his skin, and with a rush he felt the power from the Kingdom roar through him, pushing back. The smoke – it wasn’t just smoke, he realised, as it flickered around him, moving in response to the power of the Underworld. It was something more than that – something conscious, something living.

This was something old, he understood suddenly. Something that had come before the Celestials and the Chthonic Gods had woken on his earth, perhaps from before this earth had even fully formed. It wasn’t the God of darkness – it was_ the_ darkness, the darkness that had been born from the nothing when the creator had first made light. She had not meant to create darkness too, but light cannot exist without it, and now the primordial dark lived, ephemeral, in the deepest crevasses of the worlds.

A God.

Erebus.

He felt the darkness smile around him, felt its joy at being named, and once again Aziraphale saw those stars. Here was a God that had existed for longer than nearly everything in existence, sleeping and quiet in the warmth of the deep earth, dreaming of the light that it loved but could not go near for fear of snuffing it out, for fear of being snuffed out itself.

“You are welcome here,” he told Erebus. “This Kingdom was your home once, wasn’t it? Before life came and the dead followed and began to fill up these halls? I can feel it now. This was a space you carved for yourself, once.”

He heard a voice, something that was not quite words but a meaning pressed between them.

_I gave it up,_ it seemed to say. _The brilliance of light lingers even in the souls of the dead. I gave them this, so they had a place to go._

“And we are thankful,” Aziraphale replied, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes. “I don’t think anyone has ever said that to you before, so I need to tell you now.”

The smoke stroked at his skin once again, warm and comforting now.

_The Underworld is waking,_ that strange, none-voice whispered. _The earth is talking of the new God that has come to walk these quiet halls. Forgive my trespass. I came to see if you were worthy. I came to see if you were deserving._

“Am I?” Aziraphale asked, and suddenly the darkness was retreating, the light was seeping back in, and he could see something in the shadows, some subtle shift in the blackness that might have been a face if only you were to look hard enough. It was gone before he could ask again, but in its place was a sword, standing straight out of the earth.

He turned. Anathema and Crowley were crouched behind him, both of them clutching his robes, though Aziraphale had not felt it until now. They were pale, and shaking. He did not know if they had heard what he had, what they had seen, but he suspected not. He felt only a great sense of peace settle over him, as if a gentle hand had soothed him before sleep. The other two look distinctly less well-rested.

“What is that?” Crowley asked, staring over Aziraphale’s shoulder.

“It is the sword of the Kingdom,” Anathema whispered, reverential. “It is said that it will come when the Underworld is ready to wake.”

In front of them, as if it had been waiting for that very pronouncement, the sword lit on fire, orange reflecting off the blade like diamond.

* * *

He woke the day after his meeting with Erebus with a strange sense of determination. The sword, which had extinguished itself once Aziraphale had given it a good hard shake, was propped up against the foot of the bed that the palace had provided for him, glowing faintly.

“I think I know where we need to start,” he told Crowley, when he found him that morning. Crowley was where he normally was first thing – in the courtyard with the dead tree, staring up at its silvery branches. Crowley turned away, towards him, with a soft smile hovering around his mouth that made something _squirm_ in Aziraphale’s chest.

“And where is that?” he asked.

“The wraiths,” Aziraphale replied.

Which was, of course, a fine thing to say, and quite a good idea, as far as that went. Fixing the problems with the system would be worth nothing if they did not have the team to run the system properly. The wraiths were ephemeral, indistinct things, but the more Aziraphale had thought about them, the more he had got the sense that they were like other parts of this Kingdom: waiting for something to come along and shape them. Waiting to become something _more. _

“A spell of becoming,” Anathema said when he asked her about it. “A potion of some kind, I think. That should help things along. Of course, it is all to do with the magic of the Kingdom, but you need something to focus it through for now, don’t you? Otherwise who knows what we will end up with.”

Crowley had agreed, and so they had summoned the wraiths and had them stand in a long line while Anathema had made the prerequisite potion, mixing herbs with a rather determined fervour in a cauldron she had summoned to the main square. Once it had been bubbling, Aziraphale had knelt beside it, ready to begin.

“Wait,” Crowley said, looking down at the mixture. From his fingers, flowers bloomed into existence, dropping gently into the cauldron. “Clove, for dignity; poplar for courage; fennel for strength.”

Aziraphale smiled up at him.

“Thanks,” he said, quietly, and Crowley ducked his head.

He leant over the bubbling mixture, breathing in. He could feel the power in it, pulling at the magic of the Kingdom coming up through his skin, ready, as if it had been waiting for a chance to do something exciting. Anathema had been right – the potion showed his power what to do, and it seeped into the cauldron, elevating the strength of it, making it more and more potent. The potion bubbled, and then began to put out great rolls of steam with a silvery tint to it.

He stood back up as the power of the Kingdom settled under his skin again, telling him that it was done. The wraiths were breathing in the steam, and beneath their strange, smoky forms, magic was happening.

“I’m going to have to learn so many new names,” he said with a sigh as they waited. “And I’d only just got to grips with all of the Gods.”

“We could just call them Thing 1, Thing 2 and Thing 3,” Anathema remarked, dryly.

“No,” Crowley snapped. “You have to do this right. They… they are not things to be used. You have to give them respect. They are _real. _They _deserve _real names.”

It was on the tip of Aziraphale’s tongue to tell him that Anathema had only been joking, but there were storms in Crowley’s yellow eyes, blooming like bruises. Aziraphale reached out to him, the tip of his fingers finding the cool skin of Crowley’s wrist, an incredible softness.

“You’re right,” he said, instead. “What should we call them?”

Crowley’s gaze was grateful when it flicked back to him. “We don’t call them anything,” he replied. “We let them wake – we see what they call themselves.”

So they did. The vapours from the cauldron slowly drifted over the assembled wraiths, and slowly their forms began to shift, solidifying. Where once there had been just the grey suggestion of faces, now detailed features and expressions began to emerge. They hovered in their line, until one moved out of rank, looking at them. It looked masculine in form now, with dark skin and silver eyes, shoulders thickening still even as he moved.

Aziraphale stepped forward to greet him.

“My Lord,” the former wraith said, voice strong and steady. “What task would you have us do?”

Aziraphale was about to say something, was about to give him his task, but then out of the corner of his eye he caught the red of Crowley’s hair. He was right – they had to do better. These wraiths were not just charges to be set – they were subjects of the Kingdom, with all the rights and protections that any of them should have.

“I don’t know,” he said, instead. “What task would you like to do?”

The wraiths – all of them with more fixed forms now – glanced among themselves. They had not anticipated this, but soon enough took to the idea. Aziraphale had tried to explain systems of administration to them many times, and now they seemed to embrace them fully, organising themselves better than Aziraphale ever could have done. They took on tasks, split duties, and did something very impressive with clipboards and paperclips that seemed to simplify all the paperwork immediately, even if Aziraphale didn’t understand what was happening. Soon enough they left them to it, and though Aziraphale knew he would go back to check in he felt rather certain that they wouldn’t need much help from him now.

“Thank you,” Crowley said, later, when they were along again. “For listening to me about the names.”

Aziraphale wasn’t touching Crowley’s wrist anymore, and all of a sudden he wished rather desperately that he was.

“That’s okay,” he replied. “You seemed… it seemed important.”

There was a long silence as Crowley stared into the distance. He seemed far away from Aziraphale in that moment, in a whole other world.

“I don’t remember what my name was before I was cast from the mountains,” he said in the end, quietly. “I woke in the dirt with the taste of blood in my mouth and the feeling of life at my fingertips, and I couldn’t remember.”

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale started to say, but Crowley shook his head.

“I wouldn’t want it back,” he said, his voice still gentle. “I wandered nameless for a time, and then I chose my own name, I felt it in my bones. I had that choice – _everyone should have that choice. _You don’t have to be who you used to be, and no one has the power to decide who you are going to be. That is the power we have – the power over our own lives. The only power we have, really.”

Aziraphale swallowed down the swell of emotion that rose up inside him, and nodded, quietly.

He thought he might be starting to understand that, now.

* * *

The rivers came next.

They started with the Styx, the river of hatred. They walked along its banks as Aziraphale tried to work out what he was supposed to do. The power was pushing at his skin again, but he did not know what to do with it.

“What are they for?” he asked Crowley in the end, nodding at the flowers that were blooming at his feet. Crowley glanced at them as if he had not even noticed they were there.

“Mallow,” he said, after a minute. “For sweetness.”

He caught Aziraphale’s eye, and must have seen something in it because he shrugged, as if trying to downplay the meaning.

“It’s just… death, you know. It must be a bit of a bummer. Years thinking everything is fine, then suddenly, bam. Everything is over, off you go down south, leave everything behind please. I just don’t see why things can’t be a bit kinder, a bit…”

“Sweeter?” Aziraphale finished for him. “You’re right, you know. I wouldn’t have thought of it myself, but why should any of this be miserable? Why should there be hatred, here? The river is meant to be a place to swear oaths – it should be a place of balance.”

He knelt on the ground, reaching towards the water. He did not want to touch its murky depths, but the power in him was calling for it, and he knew better than to try and deny it. The water felt slightly oily against his fingers, a slight resistance at the surface as if there was a skin stretched across it, and it was cooler than he had expected.

“Give me a flower,” he said, a moment later. “I need something to show it what to do.”

Crowley knelt beside him, by the river moving sluggishly like oil, and passed him the flower. As soon as Aziraphale’s hand sank beneath the surface, with the flower held carefully in his fingertips, the waters cleared, revealing a riverbed of smooth, shiny rocks flecked with gold.

“Well done,” Crowley told him, with a smile. Aziraphale bit his lip.

“I suspect that one is going to be the easiest.”

“Which one is next again?” Crowley asked as they stood, brushing off their knees. Aziraphale winced.

“The Acheron. It is the river of pain. You remember, the one full of bones.”

“Oh yes, it’s coming screaming back now,” Crowley drawled as they walked. “White poppy for this one I think, for antidotes. Although if you ask me I would just pave over the whole thing, miserable place. Have a nice patio, instead. We could drink martinis on it.”

Aziraphale rolled his eyes, but he still took the poppy from Crowley as he knelt precariously on the bank of the Acheron. The river tossed and turned with improbable currents, but calmed as soon as the poppy hit the surface, smoothing over until it was like glass. It made the bones beneath all the more prominent, and Aziraphale frowned at them, leaning closer. The power pulsed under his skin, along his veins, and he pushed it gently into the water.

The bone closest to his fingertips shifted in the water.

“What are you doing?” Crowley asked, his voice soft.

The bone flicked a sudden tail, a fin, and around it the others started to move, pale fish in the water now, immortal and delicate. The river, suddenly full of life, slowed its harried course.

“That’s better,” Aziraphale said, with a smile. “Though I suspect Shadwell is going to hate it.”

“Well, you’re in charge,” Crowley told him as he helped him to his feet. “Just tell him to suck it up.”

The Lethe was next, the strange-smelling and slow-moving river of oblivion. Anathema had told them that the dead were made to drink from its waters before entering into the Underworld, in order to forget their earthly existence, and Aziraphale could already tell that Crowley had a problem with that premise. It did seem a little unnecessary, in a lot of ways – why did it matter if the souls of the dead remembered their lives before now?

“Any thoughts?” Aziraphale asked, but Crowley was frowning down at the water a little petulantly. Aziraphale hesitated a moment before he touched the water this time – he didn’t want to accidentally end up wiping his own memory, but as soon as he did the strange smell dissipated. He reached once again for the power that came from the Kingdom, flinching a little in surprise as he found it ready and waiting inside him. It would be quite strange, he thought, when he eventually was reassigned and he had to leave it behind. It had only been a handful of days, but he was already getting quite used to it.

“There,” he said after a moment, when the waters had turned a strange and lovely silvery-lavender colour. “Now it will just take the edge off things, take the pain away from the worst memories, and the ones that would make a person struggle to accept their place here. I think that sounds better, doesn’t it?”

Crowley swallowed, audibly.

“Much,” he mumbled. “Thank you.”

He didn’t say much as he followed Aziraphale to the next river, the Cocytus, wailing with the screams of lost souls. It was on the far banks of this river that the souls who could not pass to the Underworld because they had not seen the proper burial rites lingered, lost and afraid, until they eventually withered away, forgotten husks on the breeze. They could see them even from this side, scraps of what they had once been, drifting as if caught in a non-existent breeze.

“Why wouldn’t people get a proper burial?” Crowley asked, and Aziraphale shrugged.

“People lost a sea, or lost in war? Anyone who died away from home and everyone they knew?”

“And they get punished for that?” Crowley said, a frown creasing his brow.

“I suppose they do.”

“What about kids?” Crowley said, rounding on him.

“Umm…”

“Oh, come on!”

Aziraphale couldn’t blame him, really. He knew these things were structured around the beliefs of the living, but this didn’t really make any sense whatsoever. The animals who entered the Underworld didn’t require any sort of burial practice to be allowed access, did they? And the burial practises varied wildly from one human culture to another from what Anathema had said when she had explained the place.

He closed his eyes.

The power rippled under his skin as he reached out, the most momentous task he had tried to accomplish yet… but the fabric of the Kingdom responded to him, shifting and changing things. When he opened his eyes again the distant spirits had gone, and the screams had quietened.

“If Shadwell wasn’t angry before, he’ll be furious now,” Crowley remarked.

Aziraphale fussed around his robes, twisting his hands into the fabric.

“Yes, well,” he said. “Shadwell can jolly well get over it, can’t he?”

Crowley beamed, delighted.

Finally, they turned in the direction of the Phlegethon, the great river alight with divine flame, the smell of calciferous metal on the air. In the distance the river curved through the landscape, eventually reaching a great cave, where it flooded in and disappeared somewhere, down into the darkness. 

“I don’t know what we can do about this one,” Aziraphale said with a sigh. “I don’t know how to put out a fire like this, and I suspect we are not supposed to.”

Crowley frowned. “What do you mean?”

Aziraphale nodded in the direction of the cave, and the great darkness beyond.

“I think the fire is there for a reason. And I don’t think it is here to keep things out… I think it is to keep something in.”

“Where does it lead?” Crowley asked, looking a little pale.

Aziraphale was worrying his lip again.

“I’m not entirely sure. But I suspect that is the next thing I need to sort out.”

* * *

The next day Crowley left Aziraphale in an open room, with a soft breeze blowing through the window. He had settled down to meditate, to focus himself on the Kingdom, to investigate the strange and suspicious wherever that the flaming river went to. This left Crowley without much to do, and so he went to sit in the courtyard.

The tree within it was causing him some confusion. It refused to respond to him at all, unlike all the other plants. When he had told Aziraphale that it was not ready to change he had not been lying, but he had neglected to mention that it might well be beyond his powers to work with even when it was ready. He had never found a plant that wouldn’t respond to him before, and he spent as much time as he could trying to understand why this one would not.

Around him grew swamp magnolias, a testament to his perseverance.

The tree felt like the Aziraphale. It felt like the power that coursed through the other God, through every aspect of this Underground world. Aziraphale still seemed oblivious to the fact that the power was as much his as it was the Kingdom’s – he seemed to think himself merely a conduit, without realising that no one else could tap into those powers, without understanding that there was something significant at work here. Even the presentation of the sword had not been enough to make him realise that he was supposed to be here.

That didn’t really explain why _Crowley _was still here.

By all rights, he probably should have left. He was a Chthonic God after all, not a creature of the Underworld, for all that he had always felt a little different from the rest of his lot. He hadn’t gone to war, he hadn’t meant to get himself thrown off the mountain. He hadn’t even really believed it was happening until he found himself lying on the ground. But he was one of them, nonetheless, and he should have felt uncomfortable down here – but he didn’t. It felt right somehow, the earth strangely resonant even though it was dry. The air seemed to welcome him; the world felt steady beneath his feet. He was the strange figure dressed in dark robes by Aziraphale’s shoulder, and he felt for all the worlds like that was the place he had been created to stand in, like this was where he meant to be. He was a God of creation, of the flora, but despite all of that there was something in his bones that knew he was supposed to be here.

Ivy pooled around him, for fidelity, for marriage, for bonds that would not break.

The sound of footsteps from the hall broke him from his thoughts. He turned to see Aziraphale in the doorway, flustered, pink-cheeked, beautiful.

“I’ve found it,” Aziraphale said, breathing a little heavily. “There is a whole other level, underneath us. It is empty for now, but I can feel what it is supposed to be for.”

Crowley quirked an eyebrow, waiting for Aziraphale to continue.

“It’s a prison, Crowley. It is supposed to be a prison, for the bad souls.”

* * *

“What’s next in your Underworld rearrangement?” Crowley asked, later. They had left the palace under Aziraphale’s steam, going back to the administrative buildings. They made it to the two rooms that souls were funnelled into and paused outside as Aziraphale removed a rather densely packed clip board from the wall.

“Well, these rooms are terrible, for one,” Aziraphale remarked. “They make no sense. They are the exact same for good people or for bad people – there needs to be some kind of difference.”

Crowley tilted his head, his face flickering through a series of expressions.

“So… everyone in the bad room goes to Tartarus?”

Aziraphale blinked.

“Of course not! That’s absolutely ridiculous.”

Crowley stared at him as Aziraphale began flicking through the pages on the clipboard.

“Look at this! This person is in the evil room because they once cheated on a test. This makes absolutely no sense. Most of the people in here are not bad people – they are just _people, _who may have made mistakes and done some morally grey things in their time, but they don’t deserve to get locked up in a dungeon of eternal torment for the rest of existence.”

Crowley was looking at him, a warmth and fondness in his eyes that made something twist in Aziraphale’s chest.

“So, what are you doing with Tartarus?”

“Only the very worst, the very evil, the irredeemable go there,” Aziraphale said, rather decisively. “Though… I’m not really sure what happens to the rest of the souls.”

“Put them all in one place?”

“I don’t know…” Aziraphale replied, frowning. “The thing is… I know you’re always supposed to have two. An up and a down, a good and a bad, a Celestial and a Chthonic… but that doesn’t make much sense, does it? Why only two? That’s not how things actually work, is it? Real things are much more complicated than that.”

Crowley’s fingertips pressed against the back of his hand.

“I think a thousand rooms to reflect a thousand facets of morality might take up a bit too much space, darling.”

Aziraphale shot him a look.

“Not a thousand, no. But if the very wicked go to Tartarus, and the very good can go to another place, full of all the best things… and all the rest can just go to another place. Not a particularly good or bad place, but one not much different than the world they came from. We’ll take away all the worst things – no hunger, no disease, no rivalries or war, no prejudice – just a place where people can _be, _you know?”

“Show me,” Crowley replied, and there was so much trust in his face, so much respect and admiration, and Aziraphale did not know what to do with it. Instead he reached into the fabric of the Kingdom, pulling at the creation he had been working on during his mediations, focusing and letting the power run through him like gold through his veins until a new door appeared in front of them. Unlike the clinical, grey doors of the previous two rooms, this was made of warm wood, etched with leaf patterns, gold inlay gleaming in the light. Crowley’s fingers were still in reach, and he took his hand, pulling him through the door.

The room beyond was different – unlike the strange grey rooms, this was a whole landscape, soft green fields stretching out before them, seemingly endless.

“It needs more, I know,” Aziraphale said, a little breathless. “It needs… plants, and rivers, and places to sleep, but…”

“Those will come,” Crowley said, cutting over him. “I can feel it in the earth. You’ve set it in motion… give it a little time and it will be what you need it to be.”

Aziraphale smiled down at him. Crowley looks strangely vulnerable like this, crouched down, his long hair falling around his shoulders and partially obscuring his face.

“Start it off for me?” he asked. “It needs shaping, and you should do. I never would have thought to do any of this if you hadn’t given me the idea. Something for peace, something for remembrance, something for dignity… things like that. Good things, sweet-smelling, things to make this the right kind of place.

Crowley didn’t say anything – he just smiled a little at the ground, as if he was too embarrassed to meet Aziraphale’s eyes. Around him, plants burst from the earth, rosemary with its study stems, clove with its aromatic flowers, and twisting olives, short and reaching out to the brightness emanating from the air.

“Are you alright?” Aziraphale asked, without even quite meaning to. Crowley stood, dusting himself off. “You seem… sad, somehow, I guess?”

Crowley turned to him, his shoulders shifting and he breathed in deep.

“I am,” he replied. “It’s just… I’ve never met anyone that thinks about things like you do. It’s beautiful, you know that?”

Aziraphale felt the hot flush of embarrassment curl in his chest, across his face. He wasn’t sure what to say, but before he could something fluttered in the air above them. Looking up he saw the wings of moths, attracted perhaps to the plants, dusky browns and soft greys. He couldn’t tell if they were truly living things or some sort of soul creature, but they were the first of their kind that he had seen here in the Underworld. He couldn’t help but wonder if they had come because he had been wishing for something like that here, some semblance of the beauty of the world he had seen on the surface, something that felt truly real.

“What are they?” Crowley asked, and it was closer to a whisper than anything else. He was staring at the insects, his hand outstretched, hopelessly pale against the dark stone, as if waiting for one of them to land on those thin fingers. His expression was… Aziraphale didn’t really have the words for it. Full of joy, full of grief, vulnerable in the way that the thinnest glass is. Like he would shatter if he were pushed.

“Moths,” Aziraphale said, the word too brief, falling from his mouth, not enough even when he had nothing else to say. It didn’t properly explain what they were, he knew that, but Crowley didn’t seem to mind.

“They’re lovely.”

“Yes,” he said, watching the delight in Crowley’s warm eyes. “They are.”

* * *

Now he had started Aziraphale felt like there was a fire under him. The Underworld had already been improved so much, but there was still more to be done. He was determined to make this into a nice, welcoming place, there was a certain bestiary that definitely needed dealing with. The bestiary of the Underworld was his next task, the monsters that lurked at the gates to the Kingdom, huge and imposing and, in his opinion, a rather terrifying thing for the newly-dead to see.

Sure, they were necessary from a protection point of view – they kept out forces that might attempt to take over the Kingdom, as well as any mortal that had made it past the rivers, but that didn’t mean they needed to look quite that awful all of the time.

“I hope you’re not planning on turning Cerberus into a puppy,” Anathema said when Aziraphale told her his plans, and whilst the thought had crossed his mind (three golden retriever heads, who wouldn’t like that?) he had rather decided on a more subtle approach.

So from beast to beast he went, carefully finding the cloak of darkness and despair that each of them wore and adding a clasp to it, so that they might remove it and show their true forms beneath the monstrous visage that the lingering darkness of the Underworld had given them. It wouldn’t change their nature, not truly, but simply reveal who or what it was that lingered underneath.

He came to Eurynomos first, one of the daemons of the Underworld, with the wings and snout of a bat, infamous for eating the flesh off corpses, leaving only their bones. When he shrugged off his mantle he looked much the same, but instead of pale, corpulent skin he was covered with a warm fur, and his eyes seemed much kinder.

“Honestly,” he said, “You eat flesh _one time _and everyone decides that’s all you do. I actually just prefer a nice cup of oolong, but does anyone ever ask?”

“They never do,” Aziraphale replied, immediately bringing into existence a tea set for him.

The Hecatoncheires after that, those three enormous giants with incomparable strength, shed their fifty heads and one hundred arms a piece to a much more reasonable number. With their additional limbs went the worst of their tempers – it turned out they were only so angry all the time because of how difficult it was to actually coordinate that many limbs. The Hydra too cut down on its number of heads, which actually helped a lot with its breath problems – in the past it had been foul and rank enough to knock a man unconscious, but with far less of them the issue was much less pressing (a divine breath mint, quickly summoned by Crowley, took care of the rest).

The mighty Chimera proved a little more difficult. The fire-breathing beast was born with the body of a lion, the heads of both a lion and goat, and a thick, undulating tail that ended with the venomous head of a snake. The poor thing was very confused, and after much discussion it eventually realised that it would be much happier separated out into its constituent parts, only to reform when any threat required it. Aziraphale left the three divine beasts playing a rather spirited game of poker, feeling rather content with a job well done.

Other members of the Underworld chorus needed a different approach. The Gorgons, whose hair was made of living, venomous snakes, were perfectly content with who they were, and removing their shadows did nothing to change their appearance. Instead, it took away the stony walls that the two of them had constructed and used to bottle up their emotions, and fell on each other in grief over the loss of their third sister, Medusa, slain by a mortal hero some time before. Their looks might still have turned humans into stone, but there are some thing that nothing should ever change.

The Harpies too were quite content in themselves, those horrific bird women ripe with the smell of decay and the foetid earth. They were the personification of storm winds, of the violent wilds, and no magic could ever take that away from them. They were, however, rather pleased with the development of human hands as well as bird claws – apparently they had been dying to try crochet for some time, which was a mental image that Crowley had not needed.

As Aziraphale began to talk knitting with the Harpies, Crowley wandered off, finding himself in front of one of the very first creatures they had seen. Aziraphale’s unmasking of them had changed their form very little, and still the beast sat there with the head of a woman, the body of a lean lioness, and the great arching wings of a mighty eagle. The only difference to her now was that she could choose herself whether to speak in riddles or not.

The Sphinx stared at Crowley.

“I die once a year, yet time makes me stronger,” she said.

“I don’t know what that means,” he replied, and the Sphinx rolled its haughty eyes at him.

“What has bark but does not bite?”

Crowley groaned. Riddles were really not his thing. “Umm…”

“What dresses for summer and sheds in the winter?”

“Still don’t know what you’re getting at here, love,” he told her.

The Sphinx stared at him, eyes like emeralds, green and gleaming as if refracting its own internal light.

“Look to the tree,” she said, and Crowley blinked.

“That doesn’t sound like a riddle,” he told her.

“Yeah, well, you’re clearly not very good at them. Was being pretty obvious by the end there, you know. It’s not my problem if you can’t take a bloody hint.” She huffed to her feet then, stalking away, just as Aziraphale caught up to him.

“Are you alright?” he asked, and Crowley nodded, still frowning after her. It was well known that a Sphinx did not offer untrue words, or words without purpose. Food for thought, indeed.

“Thanks for waiting,” Aziraphale was saying, and Crowley hummed in acknowledgement, still perplexed, but a sudden shift in Aziraphale’s shoulders made him look over. The other God was staring at the ground, frowning.

“How long have you been here?” Aziraphale asked, his voice low. “Down here, in the Underworld, I mean. It’s been so long. I keep dragging you to help me with all this stuff, and making you grow things, but you probably have a thousand things you’re supposed to be doing. You must miss the surface so much – you can go, you know that right? You don’t have to stay just because I’m a mess.”

His eyes were full of something fearful, as if he was expecting Crowley to give him a look of gratitude at being released from his duties, to leg it to the surface again, and Crowley laughed a little despite himself, shaking his head.

“Honestly,” he said, “there is nowhere else I would rather be.”

“Are you sure?” Aziraphale asked, and Crowley reached over, his fingertips grazing for a moment at Aziraphale’s messy curls.

“Absolutely,” Crowley told him, his eyes gleaming in the gold light.

* * *

Later that evening Aziraphale snuck away, by himself. There was something he wanted to try, but he was embarrassed to do it in front of anyone else – mostly because the only person that knew about it was Crowley, and he neither wanted to tell anyone else about it or have Crowley watch him fail.

The Chamber of Indeterminable Things, as he had labelled it in his head, was still there, but it was different this time. Rather than covered in dust, with the feeling of decay and abandonment, the relics now gleamed, polished as if a careful attendant had been around getting it ready for a museum opening. The air smelled of sandalwood, and Aziraphale moved through the artefacts carefully, trying to be as quiet as possible, although he wasn’t entirely sure who he thought he might be disturbing.

The other things that felt different this time was… well, it was difficult to explain. Last time he had been here everything that felt normal, but now it felt like the artefacts were calling to him, responding to him, wanting his attention. There were three female-form statuettes with great wings that he somehow knew were the creatures called Furies, waiting to be released; the keys to the Gateways; a great bone etched with runes he did not know; a spring of mint suspended in a glass jar that gave him a great wave of grief that he did not quite understand. He passed them all though, until he found the Scales of Justice.

They looked how he remembered, broken. Unlike everything else this was dull, tarnished and still covered with dust and the streaky fingerprints he had left behind last time.

He picked it up again, careful, and cradled it to his chest.

From within it he felt a low thrumming, a residual echo of the power of the Underworld that he had been using. It responded to him, his fingertips tingling, and slowly, as he looked down at it, the scales pulled themselves back together, the dust and dirt falling away, the scales mending themselves. After just a few moments they looked better than new.

He put them back, carefully, and smiled in satisfaction.

From behind him came a strange creaking, and he turned, half expecting to see another ominous beast that he had not tamed yet. But instead it was just a door, that appeared out of nowhere. He moved closer, so that the sign above the door came into focus.

‘The Library of the Underworld’, it read, and he blinked.

A library? That meant…

He pushed open the door, slowly.

And inside, Aziraphale found his own little slice of Heaven.

* * *

Crowley tried a lot of things to drag Aziraphale out of the library the first couple of days, but eventually gave up when he realised how pleased Aziraphale was by the vast tomes of knowledge that had suddenly appeared before him. Everyone seemed pleased, to be honest – the Lampades, the nymphs that lit the ways of the dead, seemed delighted to come and light the lamps so that he had enough light to read by. They were strange things, silent and moving as quietly as shadows, their soft hair the same white as Aziraphale’s, glowing in the lamplight. They tittered silently at Crowley sometimes, when they found him sitting in the library, watching Aziraphale read, making him flush with embarrassment, growing dame’s violets from his fingertips.

It was only when he finally got bored, deciding to take a nap, that Crowley finally found a way to catch Aziraphale’s attention.

The chairs were not particularly comfortable for his long limbs, so after several minutes of trying to find a position that would work he gave in, and slipped into his snake form.

A few minutes later there was a clatter as Aziraphale dropped his book.

“Crowley?!” he asked, completely taken aback. “Is that you?”

Crowley raised his head from his now-comfortable perch and stared at him.

“Of coursssssse it’s me,” he hissed, wincing. He didn’t really like talking in his snake form, the letters never quite felt right in his mouth, so he switched back.

“What do you look so surprised about?” he asked. “Never seen a God change into their animal form before?”

Aziraphale looked embarrassed, glancing back down at his book, and Crowley felt immediately like an idiot. Celestial Gods didn’t go in much for shifting, he remembered now. There wasn’t much need for it, when all they did was ride around in chariots and lounge on mountaintops.

“All Gods can do it, you know,” he said. “Have you ever figured out your form?”

Aziraphale shook his head. It wasn’t that surprising, given that Aziraphale still hadn’t figured out his full God-hood – although Crowley was starting to have some significant suspicions about that. He reached out a long finger, and prodded Aziraphale in the middle of the forehead.

“It’s in there,” he said. “Some other part of you, waiting to be seen. See if you have any luck changing now. Use the Underworld powers that you’ve gotten so good at honing in on.”

Aziraphale’s expression had shifted into resignation, as if he knew it wouldn’t be successful but also knew that Crowley would not let it go until he did try. He closed his eyes none the less, and after a quiet moment, huffed out a small noise of surprise. There was a sudden wavering around his form, as if the lines of him were blurring slightly, and then there was a large dog sat where Aziraphale had been.

Crowley grinned.

The dog was a brilliant white, its fur shining almost silver in the lamplight, not too dissimilar from Aziraphale’s own hair in his anthropomorphic form. Its eyes were intelligent, and they watched Crowley with astonishment.

“I haven’t met many Gods with a dog form,” Crowley said. “Associated with protection of Kingdoms, of course, as well as death and the Underworld. It’s a good fit for you.”

He reached out to ruffle the fur on his head, a poorly timed move: Aziraphale returned to his normal form, leaving Crowley’s hand pressed against the line of his collarbone. Aziraphale was beaming at him.

“Honestly, I think you’re just bringing me luck,” he said. “I was never able to do anything like this before I met you.”

Laurel leaves sprouted from Crowley’s fingers, crawling up Aziraphale’s cheeks to settle in his hair, a victory crown for his success. Crowley felt desperately like he should say something in response to that, but the brightness in Aziraphale’s eyes seemed to be stripping all the sense from him.

“Umm, hello,” interrupted a rather embarrassed sounding voice. “Sorry to barge in. I… umm… I have a message, I think?”

They both turned, Crowley’s hand dropping away from Aziraphale’s chest. A thin, rather reedy looking God was standing in the doorway, looking rather flustered, his pale skin and dark hair making him look a little wan.

“Who are you?” Crowley asked. He thought he sounded rather polite given the presence of this strange God, but the look Aziraphale shot him suggested otherwise.

“You look familiar,” Aziraphale intervened before Crowley could say anything else. “Why do I know your face? You’re not a Celestial.”

“No… look, I’m not really either. It’s a bit confusing. I’m Newton, I’m the god of trade, messages, writing, that sort of thing? Anyway, I’m also one of the people who brings lost souls down here from time to time. That’s why I’m here.”

Crowley’s eyes narrowed.

“Alright?” Aziraphale said, sounding confused.

“Well, I mean, that’s not why I’m here, right now, interrupting you two doing… whatever it is you’re doing.” Newton fumbled his words, rubbing a hand against his already messy hair awkwardly as Crowley shot him another _look. _

“Okay?”

“I just heard some things, the last few weeks. I take messages between the Gods, you know. And… I mostly take the messages between the Celestial and Chthonic Gods.”

Aziraphale shook his head. “There is no communication between the two sides.”

“Ah, not between most of them, no. But the higher-ups… sometimes they do talk. And right now? They are talking about _you. _Both of you. Being… here. Together.” Newton looked petrified, as well he might. If the two sides were actually talking, something rather significant was happening.

“Why are you telling us this?” Crowley asked. If either side found out that this God had given up this information, his eternal life wouldn’t be worth living. Newton was looking rather uncomfortable.

“I’m... I’m not really a part of either side. But it didn’t seem fair for you not to have a warning.”

Aziraphale smiled at him. “Thank you. And you are under the protection of the Underworld, I hope you know that. If you get into any trouble, you will always be welcome here.”

Newton, looking vaguely nauseous as if he had only just realised the ramifications of what he had done, slipped away quietly, the wings on his sandals leaving an echoing rustle in the room behind him. Crowley and Aziraphale didn’t look at each other, but their hands clasped between them as they stared after him, both lost in thought.

* * *

It didn’t take long, after that.

Just three days later Crowley and Aziraphale were both woken the great clanging sound of the Gate, slammed shut in the face of intruders, sounding its deafening alarm across the Kingdom. Crowley grabbed hold as Aziraphale tried to rush out the palace, slowing him down.

“You don’t run to them,” he said, quietly. “You make them wait. You’re in charge here.”

So, they spent a very awkward ten minutes standing in the hallway waiting around silently. Crowley used the time weaving Aziraphale a crown of chamomile and pear blossom, his fingers shaking as he placed it gently on Aziraphale’s head. Aziraphale wouldn’t meet his eyes, even when Crowley’s fingertips skimmed against the lines of his cheekbones.

When they reached the Gates, they found they were not the only ones who had heeded the call of the ringing iron. The bestiary was out in full force, their monstrous cloaks back on, and a number of the lesser Gods of the Underworld had arrived too. Anathema was stood closest to the Gate, staring outwards.

“I’m not sure who they are,” she said, as the two of them approached. “But I’m guessing you two will.”

Beyond the walls, two figures stood.

Beelzebub was glaring, surrounded by the swarm of flies that always accompanied them as God of insect life. The Celestials had been a little surprised when the protector of such an insignificant insect had risen so quickly in power – but then again, the Gods who lingered in the sky had no understanding of the practical power of the insect. They didn’t know that all life was dependant on them, all growth, all new beginnings. The small fly began a cycle of life far beyond its own small size and brief existence. From the mountains, they might be insignificant, but from the ground, they had a power far beyond their individual diminutive size.

Aziraphale dared a glance to his side: Crowley was looking distinctly miserable.

“What the hell are you playing at?” Beelzebub said. It wasn’t entirely clear if they were talking to Aziraphale or Crowley. “Do you have any idea what a clusterfuck the two of you have caused?”

Crowley shrugged: Aziraphale felt it rather than saw it, and it was only then that he realised Crowley had shuffled so close to his side.

“You do not leave your post, Crowley. That is not your fucking decision to make, do you understand me? You do not get to up sticks and leave just because you’re sick of it.”

Crowley’s mouth twisted in a way that made it very clear that he was trying not to verbally respond. Probably rudely.

“Sorry,” Aziraphale said, hoping that he was properly conveying how very not sorry he was. “I’m not sure we have been introduced.”

But then the other figure stepped forward. Tall, immaculately dressed in robes the colour of the clouds, and haloed with the luminous gold ring of sunlight that always seemed to catch your eye no matter where you were looking – Gabriel was a Celestial of the highest order. The God of Sunlight, he had not deigned to speak to Aziraphale often before, and was looking rather angry at having to do so now.

“We sent you down here to cover the administration, Aziraphale,” he snapped. “Not to fraternize with the enemy and make problems!”

“I haven’t been making any problems,” Aziraphale replied, a little bewildered. “I have been fixing things like you asked me to!”

“The Underworld is an administrative entity under the shared authority of both the Celestials and the Chthonic Gods,” Beelzebub interrupted. “It has always been. And ever since you appeared, and one of my own lackeys vanished, its power levels have been fluctuating, and no one has been able to get a read on anything. I don’t know what the hell you have been doing to the place, but it ends now.”

“Full offence,” Anathema replied. “But I’m not sure we ever actually agreed to your authority. We’re quite alright without it, thanks.”

Gabriel turned his steely glare on her.

“I don’t know who the fuck you are,” he snapped. “But I’m the God of the fucking Sun, and I’m pretty sure that means I outrank you, and every single useless God that lives down here.”

Anathema pointed up at the sky.

“We have our own sun,” she countered. “Our own lands, our own laws, our own King. You have no authority here.”

“I am the only authority!” Gabriel yelled, but the Gates responded with a resounding clang, deafening in the stillness of the Underworld, as if to refute him.

Beelzebub shot the other God a rather exasperated look. They were well versed in the egocentric theatrics of Celestial Gods, having been one of the ambassadors between the two sides for some time now, but even they had to admit that Gabriel was going a bit far. They turned their eyes instead to Crowley, who was still standing on the other side of the Gate, yellow eyes fixed on the ground, where moonflowers were growing despondently around his feet.

“Crowley,” they said, their voice low. “This lunatic yelling between Celestials has nothing to do with us. Why are you here? You are a creature of the surface, of the plants and the new growth. Did this Celestial kidnap you, force you to come down here?”

“No!” Crowley retorted. “Absolutely not.”

Beelzebub’s eyes narrowed. “Then you came here of your own free will? Knowing it was expressly forbidden?”

Crowley didn’t have anything to say to that. He pressed closer to Aziraphale, who was still watching Gabriel with some concern.

“Look kids,” Gabriel said, after a long moment of silence. “You’ve had your fun. Your little bit of… independence. But now it is time for you to both fall in line. You will both return to your stations at dawn, and everything can go back to normal. We can pretend all of this has never happened, and everything will be exactly what it was supposed to be.”

There was a murmur from the Gods around them, from the monsters and beasts and all the creatures of the Underworld that had gathered around them. Aziraphale could feel the heat of Crowley at his side.

“At dawn, we will see you both where you are supposed to be,” Gabriel continued, his voice disproportionately loud. “Or else much more drastic measures are going to have to happen.”

The two Gods flickered out of reality, leaving the host of the Underworld behind.

“Are you going to go?” Anathema asked, and her voice sounded oddly vulnerable, quiet and scared in a way that it never had before. Crowley didn’t know what to say to that, didn’t know what he was _supposed _to do, but Aziraphale shook his head.

“No,” he said. His voice was quiet, but it carried, and all the host turned to hear him. “I’m not going. This is the first place I’ve ever been where I felt like I fit, and I don’t want to give that up. We’re going to find a way around this, and we’re going to stay. That is, of course, if you all want to have us here?”

“Erebus gave you the sword,” Anathema said, loud enough that everyone could hear. “The Underworld responds to you. You belong here as much as any of the rest of us do.”

There were cries of agreement, other voices shouting their approval, but Aziraphale looked only at Crowley, who was smiling just a little. The Chthonic God reached over and tucked a red chrysanthemum behind his ear.

“I’m with you.”

**Author's Note:**

> is the hades/persephone au dead yet? not according to me. 
> 
> Let me know what you think. Find me on [ tumblr! ](https://northerntrash.tumblr.com)


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